JEFFREY T. NEALON HAS WRITTEN an ambitious, insightful, and frustrating book. Post-Postmodernism: or, The Cultural Logic of Just-in-Time Capitalism sets itself a daunting task for its slim 227 pages: to assess our new-millennial present with tools from Fredric Jameson’s now-classic essay “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” first published in New Left Review nearly 30 years ago. Jameson’s essay begins from the author’s disorienting experience of the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles, which he had visited as a participant in the annual convention of the Modern Language Association, and reaches out across a wide range of instances to delineate a dominant principle that characterizes the culture of the age, which he defines as the age of multinational capitalism. This analysis was subsequently expanded into a prizewinning 1991 book of over 400 pages with the same title. As a Marxist in America, Jameson is an anomaly and a maverick, but smart as can be, and his reach for “totalization” means that he knows almost everything. During a career dating back to the 1950s, he has won the MLA’s three major prizes: for an article (1971), for a book (1990), and for lifetime achievement (2011). Internationally he is even more admired: collected editions of his work have appeared in both Brazil and China.

What does Nealon want from Jameson? Two big things. First, Jameson, as Nealon rightly argues, takes a dialectical, rather than a moralistic, approach to the nexus of culture and economy that he presents. Jameson does not lament the dominance of capitalism — though he does believe it’s “late” and may yet come to an end, having established the preconditions for a more radically free and equal world than it could itself sustain. So Nealon takes Jameson as his authority for asserting that those of us concerned with the culture of the present must not merely decry but also analyze it, and see its energies and positive aspects. I couldn’t agree more, but it’s a hard lesson.

Second, Nealon takes from Jameson a methodological principle of “transcoding” or “overcoding.” As he explains:

[I]f everything in our world exists on the same flat plane, then things that don’t at first seem to have much in common quite literally have to be related in some way(s) — the cultural realm and the economic realm, avant-garde poetry and downtown skyscrapers, for example. Or, to put it somewhat more precisely, one should be able to take the claims and effects that surround the logic of X or Y cultural phenomenon (say, that contemporary literature is open ended, process oriented, not dedicated to the limitations of univocal meaning) and dialectically overcode or transcode these cultural effects in terms of economic ones (that, say, global capitalism is open ended, process oriented, not dedicated to the limitations of univocal meaning).

Here is where things start to go wrong. Nealon’s version of transcoding makes everything the same, relating elements as possessing similar properties (i.e., open ended, process oriented, not dedicated to univocal meaning, etc.), but Jameson’s famous formula in his postmodernism book is that “difference relates.” Nealon seeks the sameness of “homology,” but there are many other different kinds of relationship (including opposition, adjacency, complementarity...